Municipal districts pass on Shelby County Schools offer of lunches, other services

Shelby County Schools provides lunches to most of the charter schools in the county, including Memphis Business Academy in Frayser where senior Tevin Smith received his lunch in January. It will not be getting business from the new municipal districts, which have decided to create their own service. January 22, 2014 — Memphis Business Academy senior Tevin Smith (left) makes his lunch selection Wednesday afternoon at MBA in Frayser where over 80% of students qualify for the free lunch program which is expanding to include breakfast and some dinners for low income students. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal files)

Shelby County Schools has a central kitchen large enough to feed schoolchildren in all the surrounding metro counties, plus a nationally recognized special education department.

But next year, it will not be serving lunches to students in the six new municipal districts formed in the county, and the verdict is still out on whether it will provide special education services.

The news about meals, and the lack of news about special education are blows to the district in the budgeting process.

The SCS nutrition service expects to lose $14.2 million in federal revenue and cut 262 central kitchen positions.

Special education is more complicated. Because the suburban schools have made no formal commitment from the suburbs about whether they plan to contract with SCS for special education services, including programs for gifted students, the county district can't determine how many students it will have next year — or how much staff it will need.

That creates a dilemma because by state statute, schools cannot reduce funding or services they provide students.

"It might be difficult to know whether we have met this test since we don't know how many students we will serve next year," Dr. Patty Toarmina, SCS director of services for exceptional children, told the SCS school board at a budget retreat in early March.

For months, SCS and members of its board have said an obvious way they could cover costs — and preserve jobs — as six suburbs form their own districts was to sell the municipal schools an array of services such as payroll, transportation, school lunches and information technology.

SCS Supt. Dorsey Hopson, who attends regular sessions with the municipal superintendents, said he is dumbfounded about the suburbs' decision not to buy school lunches.

"It blows my mind that we are not going to provide food services for all these municipalities," he said.

Not only does SCS have one of the most sophisticated central school kitchens in the nation — this year, producing 200,000 meals a day — it has received numerous awards from the White House and U.S. Department of Agriculture for innovation, he said.

"I think for them there is some politics that goes along with it," Hopson said. "You had some people early on who didn't like the CNC (Central Nutrition Center) model. People wanted to do their own cooking in-house, raise their own accounts ... What we tried to say to them is, ‘We have a nationally recognized, very nutritious feed-the-kids model.'"

Besides special education staff, SCS has fleet mechanics, electricians and plumbers it is willing to share with the municipalities. Hopson's concern is that time is running out.

"I don't know whether they have gotten that far in their planning yet or not, but my fear is we are going to get to July and August, and then there's going to be a mad rush to see what services SCS can provide.

"We welcome the opportunity, but we have to have time to plan," he said.

The municipal districts in Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, Lakeland and Millington — working as a consortium — are making plans to contract for services they need to get started, including purchasing, employee benefits, planning, business information software, school lunches, transportation and software to manage student information, like report cards and transcripts.

"For special education, we'll look at every possibility," said Collierville Supt. John Aitken. "Nothing is set in stone. All of us are working under the premise that we know we have to provide services and we need to do it as efficiently and economically as we can."

"Now, we're trying to get these things going among ourselves." It's not clear what turned the tide.

SCS board member David Reaves, who represents Bartlett, says it's no secret the suburbs are unhappy with services they are receiving through the unified district.

"Most of the feedback I get about many of the services, especially nutrition, is they are inferior to the legacy Shelby County system. I believe that is the reason you are not seeing that as a shared service. They want to be cooking in their own schools, giving cafeteria managers autonomy to buy food, prep food and manage it," he said.

Before Memphis City Schools merged with Shelby County Schools last fall, the legacy county system cooked school lunches in individual school kitchens. Under the legacy Memphis model, food is now prepared in the central kitchen on Jackson Avenue and shipped for reheating and other enhancements at the school.

"I think we are going to be putting our lunch ladies back to work," said Collierville school board chairman Mark Hansen.

When the Collierville board toured its eight schools, he said, board members heard complaints that the central kitchen model produced poor quality food and unreliable service.

Reaves said there also were missteps in bus routing that affected the suburbs in the early weeks of school last fall and technical malfunctions with APECS, the information system the Shelby County Commission chipped in $15 million to buy so the unified district could centralize payroll and other functions.

"The APECS system that we were sold was approved by the previous administration and wound up not being technically what we needed for the district," he said. "It was a product that was not supported well. For a big district, where you have so much customization, it made it difficult to get timely support. I put that on the shoulders of those who are no longer with the district. It was not the right product."

In January, SCS board member David Pickler warned that the budget outlook for SCS was dire if the district could not "mend fences" with the suburbs and sell them its nutrition, transportation and special education services.

"It is pure speculation to assign any particular reason as to the failure to achieve meaningful shared services agreements," he said in an email last week. But he said he suspects "acrimony" over the original charter surrender, legal battles and the eventual merger is a major factor.

"Another factor was the decision by the SCS board to compel settlement payments in exchange for municipal school buildings," Pickler said.

But he also blames the "vitriolic and provocative comments" members of both sides have made about each other in public. Any combination of the factors could have "effectively poisoned the well" to make any agreement "highly improbable," he said.

"Unfortunately, the ultimate victims are the children of Shelby County Schools," he said.